3D Platform Games - Who Made Them First?
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game: super mario bros. // image courtesy of super mario wiki
If you were to take someone who’s never played a game before and ask them what games they’ve heard of, there’s a good chance the ones they name might be platformers. Originally gaining popularity back in the 1980s with games like Super Mario Bros. and Pitfall!, platform games would go on to become some of the most recognizable games of all. This is still true today! Entries in the long-running Super Mario series continue to sell several million copies each, and even new platformers from unproven developers, like Celeste and A Hat in Time, have managed to achieve massive success.
Part of the reason the genre has endured for so long is because, like many other genres, it’s innovated over the years. On older hardware, platform games were, for the most part, strictly two-dimensional. You’d move left and right, jump up and down, and that was it. But as technology advanced and new hardware released, the genre evolved. Today, 2D platformers now exist alongside 3D platformers, which let you move in all directions. How did this version of the platformer come to be? What was the first 3D platformer?
The answer might depend on how you define it. In the 80s, platformers with primitive 3D gameplay actually did exist; games like 3-D WorldRunner attempted to provide a 3D experience on hardware that could only render 2D imagery. But these games weren’t actually 3D. They got as close as they could for the time, but it was still a 2D game trying to emulate a 3D look. But if you’d consider games like this to be 3D games, then 3D platformers got their start back in the 80s!
game: 3-D Worldrunner // image courtesy of nazology
However, I think many people might instead consider Super Mario 64, which came out in 1996, to be the first “modern” 3D platformer. It introduced many of the mechanics that have become staples of the genre today, and was unlike any of the games that had come before it. Super Mario 64 revolutionized 3D platformers in the same way that Super Mario Bros. had for 2D platformers years earlier. But despite being the first game to feature many of the genre’s now-staple mechanics, Super Mario 64 wasn’t the first 3D platformer.
game: alpha waves // image courtesy of reddit user Otherwise_Basis_6328
That title goes to Alpha Waves. It’s even got a Guinness World Record for it! This game was released for PCs in 1990, nearly six years before Super Mario 64. In Alpha Waves, you jump through a series of fully 3D levels, and attempt to make it to the goal in each level to move on to the next one. This concept is essentially the same as traditional 2D platformers. The visuals were also quite simple, featuring blocky, polygonal objects with nothing but solid colours to distinguish them. However, it stood out because nothing like it had ever been done before. The game was in full 3D, and you could go in any direction. So while Alpha Waves didn’t have the dramatic, long-term impact on the 3D platformer genre that some later games did, it was the very first!
One of Alpha Waves’s most obvious differences compared to modern 3D platformers is in the controls. In Alpha Waves, you can’t precisely control your direction. Pressing up or down on the arrow keys will rotate the camera around you, and pressing left or right will change the direction you’re facing. Then you press the space bar to accelerate forward at a fixed speed. You can’t jump manually, either! Instead, you have to move onto platforms that automatically make you jump, and send you higher with each bounce. It’s almost like you’re lining up shots! You aim yourself in the direction you want to go, and then try to accelerate far enough to fall onto the next platform without overshooting it. It’s definitely primitive, even compared to the 3D platformers that came just a few years later, but this control scheme makes Alpha Waves a unique experience, even today! If you’re a fan of 3D platformers, then it’s definitely worth trying. Seeing how far a genre has come can also help you appreciate aspects of newer games that you might not otherwise think about!
If you want to try Alpha Waves yourself, it’s available right here!
Wesley Naylor is a second-year student of the Professional Writing program who thinks games are rather neat! He likes learning about what goes into the development of games and seeing how they’ve evolved over time.
He also likes writing... and on this blog, he can combine those interests, just for you!
